Saturday, March 3, 2012

Pat Buchanan: Anti-Semite

Pat Buchanan: Anti-Semite

By Ben Shapiro

Pat Buchanan was recently fired from MSNBC over his latest book. It is not as if MSNBC suddenly realized that it had an anti-Semite on staff. If they really cared about that, they would have fired him years ago. As I’ve written, they only hired him in order to use him as the cardboard cut-out conservative

Last week, Buchanan proved that point in full color. He did an interview on Russia Today – the Kremlin-sponsored channel that features radical leftists like Thom Hartmann – in which he tackled the issue of Israel and Iran. “There are people that want a war,” Buchanan said. He continued:

I mean, do not think no one wants a war. You don’t have wars unless someone wants it. And quite clearly the Israeli government would like to see the United States smash Iran’s nuclear program, which they think is creating the additions where Iran could, with one leap forward, get a bomb. The Israeli lobby would like to see a war. They support the Israeli government. Neoconservatives do. Many Republicans do. There are many Americans who genuinely believe that if Iran — they believe Iran is moving toward a weapon; and if it is, they would favor military action to prevent it. There are a number of people who want a war.

He went on to suggest that Israel’s position on this was a greater threat to the United States than Iranian nuclear weapons.

Now, Pat Buchanan has long been an anti-Semite. His repulsive publication, The American Conservative, is an isolationist tract featuring the writings of magazine co-founder and open Jew-hater Taki Theodoracopulos, who calls himself a “soi-disant antisemite.” He once characterized Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld as a “very homely, simian-looking Jew who couldn’t punch his way out of a nursery,” and remarked that the United States was in danger of becoming “Israel-occupied territory,” meaning that it would be controlled by “those nice guys who attack rock-throwing youth with armour-piercing missiles.” Said Theodoracopulos, “the way to Uncle Sam’s heart runs through Tel Aviv and Israeli-occupied territory.”

Buchanan himself is little better. He has engaged in Holocaust denial, stating that diesel exhaust couldn’t have killed 850,000 Jews at Treblinka; he’s criticized the U.S. government for its apology for sheltering Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk. William F. Buckley wrote of Buchanan: ”I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.” As White House Communications Director, Buchanan urged President Reagan to visit the SS cemetery at Bitburg in Germany, providing an excellent photo-op for neo-Nazis everywhere. According to reports from the time, Buchanan had the unmitigated gall to lecture Jewish leaders who protested that they were “Americans first” and wrote over and over in his notebook one phrase: “Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews.” He wrote Reagan’s line that the SS officers were “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps” – easily one of the most sickening presidential lines in American history. Buchanan wanted the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations closed down because it was “running down 70-year-old camp guards.”

Buchanan has frequently echoed Taki’s language. In 1990, he called Washington D.C. “Israeli-occupied territory.” Before the first Gulf War, Buchanan spoke in eerily similar language to his latest attacks on Israel regarding Iran: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East – the Israeli defense ministry and its ‘amen corner’ in the United States.” You have to hand it to Buchanan – he’s never always perfectly consistent in despising the Jewish State. In 2008, he wrote, “Israel and its Fifth Column in this city seek to stampede us into war with Iran.” In 2004, he wrote, “America needs a Middle East policy made in the USA, not in Tel Aviv, or at AIPAC or AEI” – yet another reference to the sick notion that the Jews control U.S. government. In 2003, he wrote, “Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”

He consistently thinks in terms of Jewish vs. non-Jewish, rather than in terms of ideas. When Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, instead of challenging her liberalism, he pointed out that Jews “who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.” How, exactly, was that relevant? In 2007, he said, “If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is at.”

Does Buchanan consider himself an anti-Semite? Of course not. He poses as an Israel-hater who just wants to defend America against Jews, who all have dual loyalties so long as they care about the fate of Israel (what he would say about the Evangelical Christians who support Israel remains unanswered). He wrote a book called Neo-Conned! in 2005, in which he defended himself: “They charge us with anti-Semitism … The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what’s good for Israel is good for America.” Of course, this is simply ignorant – most Jews opposed the war in Iraq he was railing against. But facts go out the window when Jew-hatred comes into play.